RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.
So I dropped a new book called Life in Chaotic State... Then Silence, which is a collection of renga poetry I wrote in monthly batches on twitter. The feature renga was done October of 2018 during a three-week period where I rode the Amtrak from the east coast down south, out to California, had a week-long residency there, did a haiku slam in Oregon, then rode the [t]rain back through the upper midwest and Chicago, back down to Charlottesville. It's a pretty great book in my opinion, as are the other ones. All are available on Amazon, or from me in person.
Additionally, I'm offering up signed copies of the new book (along with a few select older titles), where you can purchase it directly from me, received it signed, with a tanka poem inscribed in it as well (since I'm doing those on postcards as part of my patreon as well), and I'll tuck a recent copy of Sovthern Gothicc Fvtvrist zine in the envelope as well. Cost for this is $12 (plus $3 shipping).
This past Sunday I had to drive my eldest and their
friend to DC to fly to Asia. There is a long stretch of United States highway
15 – the same highway I grew up along mostly – that once you get past the
Wal-Mart Supercenter and distribution zone by the interstate, and the couple of
subdivisions sprawling from said interstate’s diamond exchange with 15, it
turns to dilapidated farmland along the Blue Ridge foothills, and is straight
as fuck, so you are tempted to go a thousand miles an hour but you also know
police lurk like copperheads in the bushes, waiting to strike and inject
poisonous revenue tendrils into your already depleted financial body. As I was
fighting the urge to go a thousand miles an hour, and had withdrawn $350 from
an ATM which had been transferred by my ex-in-principle-but-still-legal-wife
from her paypal to a bank account we still shared, so that I could leave an
envelope full of cash on the kitchen counter for the wood guy next week, we saw
a bald eagle at same level as the car, dragging the entrails of a recently hit
deer along for a meal. I thought to myself, as my now adult child prepared to
get a passport stamped in southeast Asia again, “wow, that’s like, a metaphor
or some shit.” And then I kept driving along, as doomed as ever.
Every wack fuckin’ rapper on Earth now has a song
named after some shitty fuckin’ wrestler. Used to be you could make a list of wrestling
references in hip hop and be excited, but fuck man, it’s like a PWI 500 of
shitty ass songs that are just trash verses but then somebody samples one line
of Curt Henning from youtube so they call it Mr. Perfect and think that’s
clever. Everybody’s so fuckin’ tired creatively. Y’all fuckin’ suck. Try harder
with your wack asses.
Nonetheless I enjoy Westside Gunn, even though he’s
beat this wrestling reference horse to fuckin’ death. Wish ECW was actually
still around, and actually not a sub-entity of WWE, so that like Westside Gunn
could show up with the Gangstas to battle whatever little flip-floppy white
asshole tag team y’all pretend are super amazing in a double barbed wire cage
match in the ECW Arena. If rap is too corny and derivative, wrestling is too
fake woke, ignoring the fact that pro wrestling’s bread and butter demographic
is proudly and fiercely ignorant folk, not the woke. Way more people sitting in
a Trump rally than a hipster coffee shop next to the comic book store. Internet
communities have falsely made us think we don’t have to exist in the regular
world, which is still a giant piece of shit. You can’t walk through a day IRL
without stepping in the shit. Online makes you think a better world could
exist. You overlook the fact humans are fucking stupid.
In old studio wrestling, the role of the jobber was
them dudes who always lost, week in and week out. You had the glorified jobber,
who was usually the guy who seemed like he might be a star one day, minimally
so, and he usually had the main event television loss to an actual star, but
most of the jobbers were just jobbers. The true jobbers didn’t even have the
look – you knew there was little star potential in that body, just a malformed
ungraceful blob of an existence that was born to lose, even long after actual
competitive meritocracies were all replaced by theatrical oligarchies who
dedicated resources to engaging still in the performative acts of pretending
shit was real. True jobbers.
I appreciate the fact people love to hold up kings
and queens and these high cultural watermarks of greatness for all of us to
look back on and identify. This is especially important for oppressed people,
who in the larger culture are rarely allowed to see themselves in a successful
light. In order to keep people from feeling hopelessly destitute in their
humane existence, they need to feel like they can have something to attain in
life.
And yet, in every human culture from the beginning
of time, there’s many many true jobbers, and few true kings or queens. Too many
true jobbers, doomed in America, doomed in Europe, doomed in Africa, doomed in
all corners of the Earth whenever pyramid scams have been erected where some
are seen as greater than the rest. I’m very thankful for the class transition I’ve
made in life – I was born a true jobber, and now I feel like I’ve attained
glorified jobber status. I look like I could be a minimal star, there’s the
tease of actual success always present, but I come out losing most every week,
taking the loss, but doing so against even better and higher positioned talent.
It took a lot of work to not be a straight up true jobber, lot of luck too, and
I got to use the bias of the culture against itself too, because you clean me
up, put a decent shirt on me, I look like their preferred style of star to an
extent. They don’t realize I’m a piece of shit as easily as they would someone
with a different skin tone. But I don’t pretend that I’m not still a jobber,
and ain’t ever gonna hold a meaningful title while wrestling with meaning in
this performative American life where we pretend it’s still real. Nothing is
real anymore.
It’s weird that blues music got watered down by old
white dudes, because good blues music is straight up a soundtrack for fucking,
and nothing about old white dudes with goatees and funny hats is sexy at all.
In fact, that’s my litmus test for blues music. Does it have a good fucking
rhythm, and make you wanna fuck? Then it’s good blues music. And let’s be
honest, most of life’s blues come from fucking, either accidentally fucking the
wrong person, or not being able to fuck the right person. Sometimes you double
down on the poor choices and end up in a situation where you can’t even fuck
the wrong person, but you really want to anyways, and that’s when the high
quality full life blues kick in.
This made me wonder the etymology of “blues” and a rapid internet search told
me it perhaps stems from a 17th century English expression for “the blue devils”
one sees during severe alcohol withdrawal. But like all of the most wonderful
things, there’s no real known beginning of what “the blues” means, nor really
when blues music started. Shit just kinda came together, like cultural gumbo,
and then it existed bigger than anybody realized, and now it ain’t going away, because
once obsessive old white dudes get ahold of something, it’s stuck in for good.
I refuse to believe the true etymology of “the blues” doesn’t have to do with
fucking, or lack thereof though.
An old roommate of mine's, who plays the guitar. I once watched him and my other roommate get in a fight over the last piece of bread. Also my bedroom was literally a closet. We are all thankful social media didn't exist back then because that place was fucked. Anyways, Matt still does the music, classic singer-songwriter stylings, but he's not wealthy or connected to wealthy, or touring the hipster diner circuit. So he just shit, obscurely, in an attempt to make the constant train wrecks feel better.
